Over the past couple of years, Raymond Verheijen has become one of the most outspoken and talked about fitness coaches in the football world. Verheijen has worked with some of the world’s top clubs and coaches and hasn’t pulled any punches when discussing the failings of certain Premier League clubs. He spoke in-depth to us about the importance of pre-season.

Seems an obvious place to start, but just how important is it for clubs both at the top and the bottom of the leagues to get it right in pre-season?

What is important for a coach in pre-season is that he has his priorities right and that he has an understanding of what objective is most important. The most important objective in pre-season is to develop your time so that your players can develop an understanding amongst themselves, to learn to communicate verbally and non-verbally.

That is the most important objective in pre-season. To reach that objective you need all of your players available on the pitch – what you don’t need is injuries as they are the biggest hindrance to developing a team; that is the last thing you want. Unfortunately what you see is a lot of coaches overtraining players with double or triple sessions daily and as a result players develop fatigue during sessions but it is impossible to recover between sessions because the next session starts while you’re still trying to recover. If you keep doing this from day to day, week to week in pre-season, you accumulate fatigue and as a result the nervous system becomes slower and injuries become more likely because they’re still having to make such explosive movements in football training. So the one thing we should avoid in pre-season is accumulation of fatigue and by doing that you will reduce the injury risk significantly and when you reduce injuries you train and play with your strongest XI as often as possible and as a result you have maximum development of communication and teamwork.